With audio players of various types becoming more popular, consumer demand for earphones is higher than ever. With competitive earphone designs on the market, consumers are constantly looking for improved earphones. Some of the characteristics that consumers look for in earphones, generally, involve ease of operability and handling. For example, an earphone user prefers earphones that are easier to insert into and remove from the ear. While consumers generally prefer smaller earphones that are less visible and bulky, they also prefer earphones that do not require much force to put into the ears or remove from the ears. There can be a trade off sometimes between the size and ease of handling. Associated with that is the aesthetic aspect of the earphones offered to consumers. Some designs that can be easy to handle and operate, can sometimes involve shapes or designs that can be perceived as unattractive.
Another important characteristic that consumers look for in an earphone is the cost. While consumers desire high quality products, sometime it is not worth the price increase, and consumers end up settling for products with inferior performance in lieu of products at a higher price and more superior performance. Generally, the higher prices stem from high production prices and difficulty of assembly. Most earphones on the market nowadays either fall in the inferior performance/lower cost category or the superior performance/high cost category. Consumers generally end up choosing from one or the other, hence foregoing either performance for cost, or cost for performance.
Often, with more sophisticated earphone designs, the products can be complicated in design and hard to maintain. More specifically, certain parts within earphones that are pertinent to its functionality can certainly break down and require replacing. However, existing earphones are not very consumer-friendly in that respect, where consumers are often forced to discard earphones when certain parts stop performing their function such as, for example, dampers or filters. This problem ties back with the cost issue, where it can become costly for those who use earphones often when they have to frequently replace their earphones.
Another, and probably one of the most important characteristics that drive a consumer's choice of an earphone is the performance. While there is a plethora of earphones on the market nowadays, the vast majority are of low- to medium-audio quality or fidelity. In addition, many of the available earphones do not have as good noise-exclusion as needed for good listening on planes, trains, and other noisy places. This can be the root of many problems with earphones. Having poor noise-exclusion generally means that surrounding noise is often loud enough to suppress whatever the earphone user may be trying to listen to. As a result, the user will often turn the volume up, which creates numerous problems. First, the loud sounds can be very uncomfortable and bothersome for the consumers, and can be unhealthy for the hearing, and can cause hearing loss. Additionally, when a consumer turns the volume up, the quality of the audio she may be trying to listen to becomes very poor, especially the bass associated with the audio, which generally is not boosted correctly when the volume is increased to overcome the surrounding noise. Some products add a bass boost to try and cover up the surrounding noise, which generally has a low frequency emphasis, but that amount of bass boost is completely incorrect when excessive noise is not present because it alters the music or audio as intended by the artist or band performing the music, etc.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.